and I can tell you right away… it won’t be that short this time because anstellenhas almost ONE MILLION MEANINGS. Five if you want to know the exact number. And they’re about as incoherent as Inception I had rice for lunch my sentence… wait… what? Exactly!
So… let’s waste no time and find out what to employ and acting like a wuss have in common.

An has two notions it can add to a verb: switched-on-ness and at-ness. And of course in case of anstellen we’re dealing with both. As for stellen itself… if we squint our mental eyes enough it pretty much looks like to put but it’s also used as to set in context for machinery. You stellen an alarm clock for example. And when we combine this stellen with the on-an we get the first meaning of anstellen… to turn on.

Now, German has more options for to turn on and anstellen is not the most common one. It works all right in context for “mid-sized” stuff like a TV, a heater, a washing machine or a car engine, but it would definitely sound over the top for smaller things like a light, a computer or a cell phone. There anmachen is definitely the more natural choice. Actually… I don’t think I use anstellen at all but that might be personal preference.
Anyway, let’s move on to the next anstellen, which is actually sich anstellen… yap, with one of those lovely self references. This one definitely is useful because it is it’s THE word for joining a line, queuing up. How so?Well, stellen with a self reference literally means to put oneselfand it’s used in sense of to take a standing position somewhere/to stand.

And you don’t even have to say that you’re talking about a line anymore… the verb makes it all clear.
All right. Now… the first meaning we had was all about the switch-on-an, the second one was about at. The third one, a super important one, kind of brings them together – to employ.

Thomas ist bei der Bahn angestellt.

Thomas is working for/employed by the Bahn(Die Bahn is the standard short name for the biggest German railroad company with the creative name Deutsche Bahn – German Train :)

You can think of either way… as switching someone on to do a job or putting someone somewhere, at a desk for example. Both ways make sense, I think.
Now, German also has einstellen and for the process of hiring this is the better choice. Most of the “surrounding” words like nouns and adjectives are based on anstellen.And they’re official terms, too, that you’ll find in official paper work, and there, the definition is actually somewhat specific. So here’s a little overview over job statuses that each have their own rules and laws. Just skip it if you don’t care but it might be interesting :)

ein Arbeiter – literally: a worker Someone who has a regular job contract in an industrial or agricultural field

ein Beamter – literally: a be-“governmental office”-ed person.. from “das Amt” Someone who works for the state with a special kind of contract that is rife with perks like “non-fireability” and kick ass pensions. Teachers, policemen and people at the Bürgeramt for example used to be all Beamte. Those days are gone though. The little brother is Angestellter im öffentlichen Dienst (employee in public service)

Cool.
Three meanings down, two more to go. And now we’ll get to the cool stuff that make you sound super German. What? No, I don’t mean Angestelltenrentenversicherung … I meant cool. As in cooloqui… let’s just move on.
So, we’ve seen that anstellencan mean to turn on. Well… turning something on isn’t all that far from the idea of setting something in motion, right. And setting something in motion is not too far from to start doing something, right. And to start doing something isn’t far from doing something. And that’s kind of the fourth meaning of anstellen… to do. It’s NOT really a synonym for tun or machen though. It’s used in combination with a few more or even more boring noun like Ermittelung(investigation), Nachforschung (investigation, research), Analyse, Überlegungen (deliberation)

But this use is more for the newspapers. The cool use doesn’t have a noun. But instead we’ll have to add an extra notion to get the meaning. There are two options. The first one is success and so anstellenends up as to pull off.

Wie stellst du das an, immer so gut auszusehen.

How do you manage to look this good all the time./ You look so good all the time; how do you do that?

This anstellen is incredibly common with kids because it talks about exactly all these little things kids do… play pranks on teachers, break windows while playing baseball, flood the bathroom, flush down daddies iPhone while have it stream live, leave their empty liquor bottles on their neighbor’s doorst… hold that’s more like teenagers. But yeah… as specific as it may seem, this anstellen is super wide spread and everybody knows it simply because everybody has done it :).
Cool.
The last one is the trickiest one to make sense of. It is sich anstellen, so we have a self reference again… hooray… and it means something like to act. Not in the general sense of just acting or doing something. Sich anstellen means to act in contexts where you talk about HOW you act, how you go about something and it’s usually combined adjectives like clever or dumb or something like that…. now that I think about… it’s mostly combined with negative things, so people use it to complain.

How does that tie in with the meanings of an and stellen? Well, I guess it’s somehow related to the whole setting in motion thing … like… you set yourself in motion… in a dumb way. At least that makes sense to me.
The phrasing actually also works without words like dumb. Sich anstellen just used by itself is something like to act sissy, to make a fuss, to be all drama queen because of something small and negligible … I don’t think there’s the one translation but I hope you get the idea.

Thomas is always so complicated when it comes to food. Like
“What kind of oil is in there? Is that chili spicy or pepper spicy? Because I don’t like pepper spicy. Are the onion fried? Are the potatoes organic?”… soo annoying.

That last one is really really useful if you have German friends. Next time if someone wants to go home after one beer because he or she has to get up “early” or someone has the sniffles and acts like they’re having the flue or someone doesn’t want to skinny dip because the water is “cold”… just say

“Stell dich nicht so an!”

I’m sure they’ll be impressed :).
All right. We’re almost done here but before we wrap up there’s one more thing to talk about… the r-version.

ranstellen

Of course also anstellen has an r-version. And like always the r-version takes the local notion of the prefix, in this case at, very literally. Ranstellen means to put something at or right at something else. It’s not all too common but people use it sometimes when they feel just one an is not enough.

Ugh… so annoying. Like… come on… on a Friday after an exhausting course I want to get the hell out of there. I ain’t got no patience to ranstellen my flippin’ Stuhl. And besides, when I come back on Monday all tired I’d have to de-ranstellen the Stuhl which is extra work which is what I do NOT want on a Monday morn…“Stell dich nicht so an!”What? Oh… right. Sorry.
So I think that’s it. This was our look at anstellen. It does have 5 distinct meanings but 4 of them kind of go back to the same basic idea of setting something in motion… so it’s not as crazy as it seems when you just look at a list of translation… to turn on, to employ, to pull off, to do something mischievous, to do, to act a certain way while doing a task, to queue up, to act like a wuss. Yeah… that really looks crazy.
As always, if you have any questions or suggestions just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it and see you next time.

** vocab/fact sheet **

anstellen – turn onsich anstellen – to line/queue upjemanden anstellen – to employetwas anstellen – to pull off, also: to do mischief (usually used with the word “etwas/was”… doesn’t work for random nouns!!)sich dumm/schlau/ anstellen – to go about something in a stupid/smart/… way; to act stupid/smart/… while performing a tasksich anstellen – make a fuss, act sissy, be a drama queen.

spoken past: form of “haben” + angestellt

written past:stellte an

useful phrasings:Ich bin angestellt. – I have a regular job.Stell dich nicht so an. – Don’t be a wuss.

35 responses to “Prefix Verbs Explained – “anstellen””

Very nice post. That’s what people should say to themselves before starting to learn deutsch, “keine Angst! Stell dich nicht so an und lerne es”.
This is the most beautiful language on the nicest german blog, in my sexy opinion!! ‘Sieben’ brasilianische Grüße, Emauel! :D

Doesn’t really matter but in this example “das” is better because it is the better pointer that helps really establish “die Präsentation bis Montag fertig machen” as a thing. “es” sounds a tad bit too open. (just a nuance though)

They are both completely natural. It’s really just a question of style. If you want to go for speechy, pontificating language then use the second way where you integrate everything properly. If you want to sound more like you’re telegraphing something because you’re stressed or you simply don’t want to sound like the second version … then use the first.

Thanks again for the post! To queue I normally use the word anstehen, what is the difference between anstehen and anstellen? And, can I then use einstellen and anstellen indifferently when referring to hiring somebody?

“anstellen” vs “anstehen” … that’s German being anal about indications of location. German pretty much always expresses somehow whether you’re moving or at a fixed spot. “Anstellen” is moving. You’re not in line before, you’re in line after. “anstehen” is the result of “anstellen”…. the being in line. In some contexts both are possible

– I don’t want to wait in line now.
– Ich will mich jetzt nicht anstellen./Ich will jetzt nicht anstehen.

Oh, and “anstehen” has no self reference.
As for “einstellen” and “anstellen”… “einstellen” is the process of hiring. “anstellen” as a verb isn’t really used that much. People would understand it of course and I’m sure legal documents are full of it but in daily life I don’t hear/read sentences like this very often:

Re. the cartoon at the top of the page: why does the first speaker not use “Sie”, like the second speaker does? I’ve read that in the second-person-formal imperative, one cannot omit the “Sie”, yet I seem to see it a lot. Or is that not an imperative statement?

Not really… if I think long and hard enough the version with “anstellen” might sounds a little tiny bit more technical. “Anstellen” leans a bit more toward procedures while “schaffen” can be a one-action-activity. Like… I wouldn’t use “anstellen” in context of taking the 1 Million dollar shot (basketball) and scoring it.
Also, “schaffen” is usually used to talk about the positive outcome only. “Anstellen” can be used to focus more on the process that leads to a positive outcome. Example:

– Wie stellen wir das am besten an?
– How should we go about it (to pull it off)?

– Wie schaffen wir das?
– How can we pull this off?

Bottom line… there are subtle differences but in your example they sound the same to me.

This impersonal imperative has no person established. You can say “Nicht rennen!” to one kid or a whole bunch of them. Everybody always feels addressed. And since there is no person, you can’t reference one and so the stuff works without a self reference. It’s very common in daily German whenever you don’t really want to address anyone in particular.
Hope that helps

Thx a bunch, it did help, big time! The “impersonal imperative” is not a problem for me to understand, since it exists also in my language (Portuguese). The difference is exactly that, in German, the verb loses the reflexive form, whereas, in Portuguese, it doesn’t.